Tag Archives: Love

So some of you know that I have this secret annual tradition called the ‘annual mail’, which is my way of saying both ‘Thank You’ to everyone I love, like or admire; and a way of sharing some lessons I picked up in the year gone by. I’ve been writing it every year for the last seven years (new edition coming soon!) but I’ve never made it public, because it isn’t meant to be.

“Doesn’t it boggle your mind sometimes?” I asked.
“What?” she replied.
“How, in this very moment, thousands of people in the world are falling in love for the first time? How, at this very second, thousands more are sharing their first kiss? How, in the breaths we just took, millions of people just held hands with someone special to them…. and how, thousands of them are never going to let go? How, there are hundreds of thousands of embraces being shared by couples who spend each day in the… the… glorious agony… of love? How there are pulses racing faster and hearts pounding louder and butterflies fluttering in every direction inside thin, fat, chubby, six-packed stomachs… how thousands of romantics are living and dying in the pause, right now, before that ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, and how millions of lives are changing forever with the answer? How there’s love and requital and happiness; and how there’s love and heartbreak and pain; and how, in this very moment, there’s so much love… how, in this very moment, there’s just… so much love… that has been found, forever, and ever?” I took a deep breath. “Doesn’t it boggle your mind?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because for me… in this very moment, there’s no one else but you and me,” she said, firmly wrapping her arms around my soul.

Oh, it was so easy to fall in love with her.

Note: This story was first published on August 31, 2014. It was written for Daisy, my fiance at the time, who’s now my wife :).

Somewhere in between in trying to pull of the 13th ripoff of FRIENDS and doing all-new shows about brilliant white men with issues, dysfunctional white families but in a different decade or from a different planet, or just shows with Tim Allen in them, American television discovered that love is a big deal.

It is possible that this transpired during the final season of How I Met Your Mother, when half the world and their respective halves fell in love with Ted falling in love with Tracy McConnell. Even with its horrid and agonising conclusion, the season finale of the show unsuspectingly did something peculiar : For a show that taught the ‘move on’ generation what it really means to hold on to friendship forever, it left in its legacy, more than anything else, one of the sweetest romantic comedies modern day television has seen.

And what is even the point of television, if it isn’t to find out the sweet spot that fills the forever empty (ref: Louis CK) in our lives and give us more of the very same, packaged in a hundred thousand different original ways? Pop philosophy aside, since love is the new trend, here are five new and improved shows you can watch on love this fall TV season:

You’re The Worst: Arguably the most different of ‘the same’, the show is an exceedingly enjoyable and exceptionally toxic take on love, relationships and everything that the heart holds sacred. If Satan’s minions had to make a romcom, the characters of this show would fit right in. An anti-sitcom, this hilarious show is a must, must watch, if you’re looking for something fresh on TV.

A to Z: The spinoff to How I Met Your Mother didn’t take off, because after Cristin Milioti, no one’s going to accept so easily another woman meeting the father of her kids on TV again. And so, A to Z is poised to win this game of romcom sitcoms, because it stars Milioti in the lead. The fact that Rashida Jones & Will McCormack have produced this cannot hurt, because Celeste and Jesse Forever (google it).

Selfie: A remake of My Fair Lady with an Asian man and a Scottish woman set in the world of social media? Sounds suspect, but when you know the very cool John Cho and Karen Gillan (Dr Who) are those leads, and the trailer looks like a bunch of fun too, Selfie’s got us interested from the world ‘click’.

Marry Me: A show from the creator of the very underrated Happy Endings is back with a show based on his marriage with Casey Wilson, who was the best thing about the show, and is usually the best thing in any comedy? Sold!

Manhattan Love Story: The show’s trailer looks terribly generic and the fact that you can hear the lead couples’ thoughts throughout their relationship has us disturbed already for that moment when the ‘bad sex’ sitcom trope unfolds. But the series stars in its lead Analeigh Tipton, who we totally love from Crazy, Stupid, Love, so we will still be watching this, ever so cautiously.

It was Mumbai being Mumbai. The rain was outdoing itself, just like it had done so yesterday, just like it had done so the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that… it was just about that time of the season when the junta had stopped romanticizing the bloody darn showers, the bloody darn non-existent ‘hot pakodas’, the bloody darn ever-existent ‘cutting chai’, and bloody darn romance itself, which, incidentally, was uniquely and singularly absent from Aniket Hazare’s life.

Aniket Hazare. Ha. The lesser said about Aniket Hazare’s life, the better. To be very honest, the only thing remarkable about Aniket Hazare’s life was how utterly unremarkable it was. Yes, Aniket Hazare was Arthur Dent, but before he hitchhiked across the galaxy, and become the unlikely hero of a bestselling novel. The only thing heroic about Aniket Hazare’s life was that a man with the same last name had managed to unite the country together in a revolution, ironically, for, hating the country together. Well, almost.

Aniket Hazare’s glory had been just as short-lived as the revolution was. When the revolution had begun, everyone and their various ignorant, non-Maharashtrian relatives wanted to know if he was related to the other, more famous and utterly remarkable A Hazare, and simply wanted to say how proud they were of him. But when the revolution abruptly ended, while the glory abruptly ended too, somehow Aniket Hazare’s surname metamorphosed itself into some sort a trigger that would elicit the most strongly-opinionated comments from everyone and their various ignorant relatives, Maharashtrian or otherwise.

And when these diatribes did not even diminish a respectable amount of time beyond the point – and there needs to be a word for this – at which it stopped being cool to talk about it… let’s call it the ‘hipster point’. So when these diatribes did not even diminish a respectable amount of time beyond the hipster point, it made Aniket Hazare very angry. Well, not *very* angry. Just a sufficient, unremarkable amount of angry that a sufficiently unremarkable sort of person like him would get. Except that Aniket Hazare managed to channel this anger into a heroic hobby, if ever there was one, and that would turn out to be the only other heroic thing about Aniket Hazare’s life.

But apart from this heroic hobby, Aniket Hazare was as much a hero as Daarshik Godbole was, and we all know that Daarshik Godbole is no hero. But like every unremarkable, plain-looking middle-class Indian fellow, Maharashtrian or otherwise, with a flat-ish screen TV and a high-ish speed internet connection, Aniket Hazare was no stranger to dreams.

Aniket Hazare loved to dream dreams. He loved to dream coloured dreams and Technicolor dreams, realized dreams and incomplete dreams, romantic dreams and horror dreams, Indian dreams and foreign dreams. Aniket Hazare loved to dream dreams because unlike the remarkable case of his unremarkable reality, Aniket Hazare was a hero – the hero – of his dreams.

Aniket Hazare was the hero who won the fair maiden, who ran towards her in slow motion in a garden full of roses and lilies and daisies, and who eventually ended up doing unspeakable deeds behind a sunflower in close up, after having run around a tree for the amount of time sufficient for a hero to run around trees. The hero who won the fair maiden, who he met by a fortuitous accident on a sunny day or a rainy one, in an elevator or an escalator, in a plane or on a tram, on an empty road or in a traffic jam.

But on this day, when Mumbai was being Mumbai, and the bloody darn rain was outdoing itself, and there were no bloody darn hot pakodas and no bloody darn cutting chai in the bloody darn traffic jam, that was ceaseless at its origin, and ceaseless at its destination, Aniket Hazare’s life was being its usually unremarkable self, and there was no fortuitous accident waiting to happen, and no likely love story involving a fair maiden whose car had given up on her, and who, for some strange reason, wanted to hitch a ride with him to Borivali.

And just then – like in all great romantic stories that no one ever reads these days, in which the phrase ‘just then’ would indicate something wholly magical – the world became very still, as there was a knock on the window of Aniket Hazare’s Maruti 800, which was just as unremarkable as he was, or perhaps, even more so, and it was a fair maiden with a red umbrella, fighting off the furious rain, who for some strange reason, wanted to hitch a ride with him to Borivali. Something wholly magical was about to happen.

Note: This story was first published on June 28, 2013. The part II of this story was never published (or written :p)

“I’m scared,” she half-smiled, not attempting in any way to hide her anxiety.

“About what?” I asked, pretending to not know the answer.

She looked at me nervously, but didn’t say a word. Instead, she let her brown, deep eyes do the talking.

“You won’t get caught,” I smiled reassuringly.

Her hand was inches away from mine, but I wasn’t sure if I’d come across as romantic or rash if I held it. So instead, I directed her attention towards the vast blue ocean in front of us.

“Forget about your father,” I said. “Forget about traditions. Forget about religion. Forget about restriction. Forget about punishment. Forget it all, and close your eyes. Close your eyes and take a deep breath.”

As if waiting to hear those precise words, she closed her eyes. In the deep breath she took, there lay another brave little step in taking on the world she could only resent, but not desert; that she could only disturb, but not defy.

She opened her eyes once again to the gorgeous view in front of her.

“How does it feel now?” I asked

“It feels like freedom,” she smiled, as my hands gently reached for hers.

Note: This story was first published on October 17, 2011. It was written for an online group. We were given the above image and asked to write flash fiction on it.